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Judith Copithorne was involved in the heyday of experimental writing and publishing that was centred in Kitsilano in the early 1970s. Published in the first issue of bill bissett's blewointmentpress, she conducted workshops in schools and published several poetry collections, plus co-produced West Coast Cards, four postcards with George Bowering, Sharon Thesen & Robin Blaser (Vancouver: West Coast Line and Beaver Kosmos, 1990.) "There was a lot of consolidation, power plays, critical wars and various other sometimes completely underground battles in the 70s," she recalled. "Often much tighter and smaller groups emerged both for good and bad... As a person interested in variety, change, curiosity and the unexpected, I prefer more open groupings."
Bibliographic information provided by Judith Copithorne in 2012:
Born (1939) & have lived, mainly, in Vancouver. Received B.A. & Teachers Certificate from U.B.C. Involved with writing, concrete poetry & other interrelated forms throughout life. Selected Books and Pamphlets: RETURNING. North Vancouver, Returning Press, 1965. RELEASE. Vancouver, Bau-Xi Gallery, February, 1969. RAIN. Toronto, Ganglia Press, 1969. RUNES. Toronto & Vancouver, Coach House Press & Intermedia Press, 1971. MISS TREE'S PILLOW BOOK. Vancouver, Intermedia Press & Returning Press, 1971. UNTIL NOW. Vancouver, HeShe&ItWorks, 1971. ARRANGEMENTS. Vancouver, Intermedia Press, 1973. A LIGHT CHARACTER. Toronto, Coach House Books, 1985. TERN. Vancouver, Returning Press, 2000. HORIZON. Toronto, Pangan Subway Ritual, 1992 "Recently I have published work in several places including fhole, 1 cent, industrial sabotage, West Coast Line, Rock Salt, Rampike & Making Waves, (containing list of important poetry events & publications occurring in Vancouver proper in the 1960's), published by Anvil Press, Vancouver in November, 2010. Issue 400 of 1 cent contains a bibliography. It can be acquired from jwcurry's book store, Room 302, 880 Sommerset West, Ottawa K1K 6R7."
Daniel F. Bradley published her work in fhole as did jwcurry in industrial sabotage & also as post cards & broadsides. She published Brackets & Boundaries under her own imprint.
Some of her work can be seen on-line at www.Ditch poetry.com, The Intermedia Poetry Project, & 17 Seconds (a journal of poetry and poetics), Issue 2.
Issue 400 of 1 cent, 15 March, 2009, contains a bibliography of much of her work to that date. It can be acquired from jwcurry's book store, Room 302, 880 Sommerset West, Ottawa K1K 6R7.
Judith Copithorne compiled a check list of important poetry events & publications that occurred in Vancouver proper in the 1960s, with her commentary on these events, in a collection of essays called Making Waves, edited by Trevor Carolan for Anvil Press in November of 2010. This checklist is also available on-line in Issue Three of the University of the Fraser Valley Research Journal.
Judith Copithorne died on May 15, 2025.
BOOKS:
Returning (North Vancouver: Returning Press, 1965)
Release: Poem-Drawings (Vancouver, Bau-Xi Gallery, 1969)
Rain (Toronto: Ganglia Press, 1969)
Runes (Toronto/Vancouver: Coach House/Intermedia, 1971)
Miss Tree's Pillow Book (Vancouver: Intermedia / Returning Press, 1971)
Until Now (Vancouver: Heshe&ItWorks, 1971)
Heart's Tide (Vancouver Community Press, Writing Series #8, 1972)
Four Parts Sand (Oberon Press, 1972). With Earle Birney, bill bissett & Andrew Suknaski
Arrangements (Intermedia Press, 1973)
Third Day
Dislexia
A Light Character (Coach House Press, 1985)
Horizon (Toronto: Pangan Subway Ritual, 1992)
Tern (Vancouver: Returning Press, 2000)
Brackets & Boundaries (Vancouver: Returning Press, 2012)
Another Order: Selected Works (Talonbooks, 2024) $34.95 9781772015539.
Edited by Eric Schmaltz.
ANTHOLOGY:
Making Waves: Reading B.C. and Pacific Northwest Literature (Anvil, 2011) Edited by Trevor Carolan
[BCBW 2025] "Poetry"
***
REVIEW
Another Order: Selected Works
by Judith Copithorne. Eric Schmaltz, Ed. (Talonbooks $34.95)
by Trevor Carolan (BCBW 2024)
From the early countercultural stirrings of Vancouver’s Sixties, poet and all-around femme de lettres, Judith Copithorne has been a significant participant in bringing challenging words and images from the city to the larger world. Her probing cross-media experiments with visual and concrete poetry broadened the limits of what Canadian literary adventuring could be, and in doing so, helped budge Vancouver from its once gender-biased, colonial identity.
Nevertheless, for much of her more than 50 years of practice, Copithorne has remained something of an obscure figure. With this compelling, 340-page book compiled by editor Eric Schmaltz, the fuller nature of Copithorne’s creative explorations—that frequently appeared in small, limited-run editions—is displayed convincingly. The dynamics of her work, as Schmaltz explains, have encompassed “illustration, sketching, calligraphy, and typewriting while bringing together poetry, visual art, comics, life writing [and a] tireless fusing of technique, mode and genre.”
Two-thirds of the book is indicative of Copithorne’s enduring interest in verbal and graphic-writing explorations that, while timely now, back then were associated with the avant-garde poetics of fellow writers like bill bissett, bpNichol and Pierre Coupey. With typesetting not easily available, Copithorne’s mode was to marry handwritten lines of her poetry with drawings that echo Haight-Ashbury’s Sixties poster art, making it visually effective yet demanding to read. In tracing the geography of her poetic meditations on self, love, lost love and emotional change, Copithorne’s epigrammatic visual art-poems are emblematic of the gestalt of Vancouver’s generational quest for a deeper authenticity at that time, including growing interest in Asian philosophies. BC arts veteran, Ed Varney has commented how Copithorne’s visual effect was “mandelic: [she] was turning poetry into a mandala.”
With Vancouver’s academic and “downtown” poetry scenes still dominated by male fraternities, Copithorne’s explorations served to pave the way for a Seventies generation of younger feminist writers at a time when women writers and their books needed more visibility. Schmaltz’s selections of Copithorne’s prose, for example, shows her conversant with the diary poetics of Anaïs Nin, a formative voice in world literature’s feminist awakening. Nin and Copithorne showed others how to bring intimacy into their language.
A substantial excerpt from Copithorne’s Heart’s Tide (1972) offers a fictional-biographical portrait of the typical struggles of a younger woman in those times. From childhood self-awakening to adolescent adventuring with men looking to take advantage, to accounts of an affair with a married lover, then life in a crummy residence hotel, and an edgy bus journey to San Francisco, the narrator recounts her daily life routines and the energy from a growing sexual liberation. When unexpected pregnancy and medical distress intervene with unfounded accusations of abortion, the work’s dream accounts and stream-of-awareness techniques present Copithorne with an opportunity to address one of the most acute feminist issues of that era. Her closing resolution feels open-ended: “Hanging on to nowhere to go. Sighing like the wind in the trees.”
Schmaltz’s introduction notes how “slants towards other genres, including the closely related field of comics” is evidenced in Miss Tree’s Pillow Book, originally an innovative Intermedia publication. Melding antic humour, cartoons and references to Zen Buddhism’s “Middle Way,” it’s a sophisticated handwritten comic narrative for enthusiasts that’s “Hooked on love / in love with love they say.” Later, Copithorne’s purely visual designs become more complex, futuristic, and the insert of 14 superb colour images resonates with vestigial Celtic imagery echoing medieval Hibernia’s Book of Kells.
Copithorne is known as a poet with a reputation for toughness, so the frequent references to love and tenderness throughout her poems may catch some unawares. Early selections feature irregular and slant rhyme; there’s talk in her poem Returning about how “memories live in our blood…”. From the Seventies, her craft features greater sharpness of language that grows in density and lyric movement:
Who are we now, the always mystery?
Questions, more than answers
when we: man, woman
body on body: spine moving
are bigger than these words
and these words attain their meaning.
When in As the Years Turn she writes, “spring is so short in our burden of months,” there’s an expanding sense of her work as a serial in which the poems in their beauty and fluency of language unfold from a narrative Oneness. Similarly in Tempering:
…there are countless stories,
rivers without end, rain
plummeting to
the shed roof. Today is felt in
shivering
ecstasy, frantic, magic,
unknowing…
years pass, love falls nameless
to autumn’s track.
In the mature selections from the Eighties onward there’s increasing attention paid to ways of seeing: “…We heard you watching the yellow / bird and we said / she is seeing some colours / singing.”
Copithorne’s poetic subjects are diverse and tastefully uncomplicated: making yogurt, prose-poem reflections on cityscapes, glimpses into the I Ching, a raunchy, erotic quintain [“I want you…”]. Recent years have seen her star rising as a one-of-a-kind artist from the coastal city she loves. At times abrupt, strong, vulnerable and a revealing teacher, she has known everybody and worn many hats, emerging as a wise elder sister for anyone taking the time to delve into her eclectic bibliography.
“What we have done then,” she contends in Arrangements, “was the best we could do / There should be more… / will be / since all things change / and continue, also.” 9781772015539
Trevor Carolan writes from North Vancouver.
Bibliographic information provided by Judith Copithorne in 2012:
Born (1939) & have lived, mainly, in Vancouver. Received B.A. & Teachers Certificate from U.B.C. Involved with writing, concrete poetry & other interrelated forms throughout life. Selected Books and Pamphlets: RETURNING. North Vancouver, Returning Press, 1965. RELEASE. Vancouver, Bau-Xi Gallery, February, 1969. RAIN. Toronto, Ganglia Press, 1969. RUNES. Toronto & Vancouver, Coach House Press & Intermedia Press, 1971. MISS TREE'S PILLOW BOOK. Vancouver, Intermedia Press & Returning Press, 1971. UNTIL NOW. Vancouver, HeShe&ItWorks, 1971. ARRANGEMENTS. Vancouver, Intermedia Press, 1973. A LIGHT CHARACTER. Toronto, Coach House Books, 1985. TERN. Vancouver, Returning Press, 2000. HORIZON. Toronto, Pangan Subway Ritual, 1992 "Recently I have published work in several places including fhole, 1 cent, industrial sabotage, West Coast Line, Rock Salt, Rampike & Making Waves, (containing list of important poetry events & publications occurring in Vancouver proper in the 1960's), published by Anvil Press, Vancouver in November, 2010. Issue 400 of 1 cent contains a bibliography. It can be acquired from jwcurry's book store, Room 302, 880 Sommerset West, Ottawa K1K 6R7."
Daniel F. Bradley published her work in fhole as did jwcurry in industrial sabotage & also as post cards & broadsides. She published Brackets & Boundaries under her own imprint.
Some of her work can be seen on-line at www.Ditch poetry.com, The Intermedia Poetry Project, & 17 Seconds (a journal of poetry and poetics), Issue 2.
Issue 400 of 1 cent, 15 March, 2009, contains a bibliography of much of her work to that date. It can be acquired from jwcurry's book store, Room 302, 880 Sommerset West, Ottawa K1K 6R7.
Judith Copithorne compiled a check list of important poetry events & publications that occurred in Vancouver proper in the 1960s, with her commentary on these events, in a collection of essays called Making Waves, edited by Trevor Carolan for Anvil Press in November of 2010. This checklist is also available on-line in Issue Three of the University of the Fraser Valley Research Journal.
Judith Copithorne died on May 15, 2025.
BOOKS:
Returning (North Vancouver: Returning Press, 1965)
Release: Poem-Drawings (Vancouver, Bau-Xi Gallery, 1969)
Rain (Toronto: Ganglia Press, 1969)
Runes (Toronto/Vancouver: Coach House/Intermedia, 1971)
Miss Tree's Pillow Book (Vancouver: Intermedia / Returning Press, 1971)
Until Now (Vancouver: Heshe&ItWorks, 1971)
Heart's Tide (Vancouver Community Press, Writing Series #8, 1972)
Four Parts Sand (Oberon Press, 1972). With Earle Birney, bill bissett & Andrew Suknaski
Arrangements (Intermedia Press, 1973)
Third Day
Dislexia
A Light Character (Coach House Press, 1985)
Horizon (Toronto: Pangan Subway Ritual, 1992)
Tern (Vancouver: Returning Press, 2000)
Brackets & Boundaries (Vancouver: Returning Press, 2012)
Another Order: Selected Works (Talonbooks, 2024) $34.95 9781772015539.
Edited by Eric Schmaltz.
ANTHOLOGY:
Making Waves: Reading B.C. and Pacific Northwest Literature (Anvil, 2011) Edited by Trevor Carolan
[BCBW 2025] "Poetry"
***
REVIEW
Another Order: Selected Works
by Judith Copithorne. Eric Schmaltz, Ed. (Talonbooks $34.95)
by Trevor Carolan (BCBW 2024)
From the early countercultural stirrings of Vancouver’s Sixties, poet and all-around femme de lettres, Judith Copithorne has been a significant participant in bringing challenging words and images from the city to the larger world. Her probing cross-media experiments with visual and concrete poetry broadened the limits of what Canadian literary adventuring could be, and in doing so, helped budge Vancouver from its once gender-biased, colonial identity.
Nevertheless, for much of her more than 50 years of practice, Copithorne has remained something of an obscure figure. With this compelling, 340-page book compiled by editor Eric Schmaltz, the fuller nature of Copithorne’s creative explorations—that frequently appeared in small, limited-run editions—is displayed convincingly. The dynamics of her work, as Schmaltz explains, have encompassed “illustration, sketching, calligraphy, and typewriting while bringing together poetry, visual art, comics, life writing [and a] tireless fusing of technique, mode and genre.”
Two-thirds of the book is indicative of Copithorne’s enduring interest in verbal and graphic-writing explorations that, while timely now, back then were associated with the avant-garde poetics of fellow writers like bill bissett, bpNichol and Pierre Coupey. With typesetting not easily available, Copithorne’s mode was to marry handwritten lines of her poetry with drawings that echo Haight-Ashbury’s Sixties poster art, making it visually effective yet demanding to read. In tracing the geography of her poetic meditations on self, love, lost love and emotional change, Copithorne’s epigrammatic visual art-poems are emblematic of the gestalt of Vancouver’s generational quest for a deeper authenticity at that time, including growing interest in Asian philosophies. BC arts veteran, Ed Varney has commented how Copithorne’s visual effect was “mandelic: [she] was turning poetry into a mandala.”
With Vancouver’s academic and “downtown” poetry scenes still dominated by male fraternities, Copithorne’s explorations served to pave the way for a Seventies generation of younger feminist writers at a time when women writers and their books needed more visibility. Schmaltz’s selections of Copithorne’s prose, for example, shows her conversant with the diary poetics of Anaïs Nin, a formative voice in world literature’s feminist awakening. Nin and Copithorne showed others how to bring intimacy into their language.
A substantial excerpt from Copithorne’s Heart’s Tide (1972) offers a fictional-biographical portrait of the typical struggles of a younger woman in those times. From childhood self-awakening to adolescent adventuring with men looking to take advantage, to accounts of an affair with a married lover, then life in a crummy residence hotel, and an edgy bus journey to San Francisco, the narrator recounts her daily life routines and the energy from a growing sexual liberation. When unexpected pregnancy and medical distress intervene with unfounded accusations of abortion, the work’s dream accounts and stream-of-awareness techniques present Copithorne with an opportunity to address one of the most acute feminist issues of that era. Her closing resolution feels open-ended: “Hanging on to nowhere to go. Sighing like the wind in the trees.”
Schmaltz’s introduction notes how “slants towards other genres, including the closely related field of comics” is evidenced in Miss Tree’s Pillow Book, originally an innovative Intermedia publication. Melding antic humour, cartoons and references to Zen Buddhism’s “Middle Way,” it’s a sophisticated handwritten comic narrative for enthusiasts that’s “Hooked on love / in love with love they say.” Later, Copithorne’s purely visual designs become more complex, futuristic, and the insert of 14 superb colour images resonates with vestigial Celtic imagery echoing medieval Hibernia’s Book of Kells.
Copithorne is known as a poet with a reputation for toughness, so the frequent references to love and tenderness throughout her poems may catch some unawares. Early selections feature irregular and slant rhyme; there’s talk in her poem Returning about how “memories live in our blood…”. From the Seventies, her craft features greater sharpness of language that grows in density and lyric movement:
Who are we now, the always mystery?
Questions, more than answers
when we: man, woman
body on body: spine moving
are bigger than these words
and these words attain their meaning.
When in As the Years Turn she writes, “spring is so short in our burden of months,” there’s an expanding sense of her work as a serial in which the poems in their beauty and fluency of language unfold from a narrative Oneness. Similarly in Tempering:
…there are countless stories,
rivers without end, rain
plummeting to
the shed roof. Today is felt in
shivering
ecstasy, frantic, magic,
unknowing…
years pass, love falls nameless
to autumn’s track.
In the mature selections from the Eighties onward there’s increasing attention paid to ways of seeing: “…We heard you watching the yellow / bird and we said / she is seeing some colours / singing.”
Copithorne’s poetic subjects are diverse and tastefully uncomplicated: making yogurt, prose-poem reflections on cityscapes, glimpses into the I Ching, a raunchy, erotic quintain [“I want you…”]. Recent years have seen her star rising as a one-of-a-kind artist from the coastal city she loves. At times abrupt, strong, vulnerable and a revealing teacher, she has known everybody and worn many hats, emerging as a wise elder sister for anyone taking the time to delve into her eclectic bibliography.
“What we have done then,” she contends in Arrangements, “was the best we could do / There should be more… / will be / since all things change / and continue, also.” 9781772015539
Trevor Carolan writes from North Vancouver.
